The world's top central bankers and regulators last night reached broad agreement on new standards to make sure the banking system could cope with any new financial crisis.
'The agreements reached today are a landmark achievement to strengthen banking sector resilience in a manner that reflects the key lessons of the crisis,' European Central Bank president Jean-Claude Trichet said.
Trichet was commenting on the Group of Governors and Heads of Supervision which oversees the work of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, which has been asked to draw up a new regulatory framework for the banking industry.
The Basel Committee is drawing up a new framework - dubbed 'Basel III' - to update previous regulatory accords in the fall-out from the global financial crisis which sank many banks and plunged the global economy into recession.
Its recommendations will be submitted to a summit of the Group of 20 top economies later this year for approval.
The reforms and changes mainly cover capital and liquidity, and debt and provisioning rules to ensure that the commercial banks retain enough reserves to get them through any fresh crisis with the need to be bailed out.
Some analysts said today that regulators had succumbed to intense lobbying from banks and watered down some of the proposals, giving banks more time to meet some of the standards.
